However many times Jack Nicholson has sat courtside for however many NBA championships, no one in basketball ever had a better seat than Herb Sendek.

When he was the young head coach at Miami University in Ohio and Charlie Coles was his assistant, the two would drive around the Midwest on recruiting trips. And Sendek got to listen to Coles tell stories for hours and hours.

“We would get an early start, stop at an Open Pantry and get some coffee, and off we’d go,” Sendek, now head coach at Arizona State, told Sporting News. “The basketball talk and the stories never ended. He could hold court with one person or a large group. He had such experiences, such insights into the human condition and life. One could listen to him endlessly.”

Coles passed away suddenly Friday morning at age 71, Miami University officials confirmed to the Cincinnati Enquirer. He had retired from coaching the RedHawks last spring, following his 16th season with the program. Last fall, he was honored along with his wife Delores by the Cincinnati chapter of Coaches vs. Cancer at its annual tip-off breakfast. Not surprisingly, Coles made everyone in the audience laugh with his very first sentence after the two walked to the dais to a standing ovation.

”They told me we had five minutes to talk,” Coles said, “but it took us three minutes to get up here.”

It was tough to determine whether Coles was a better entertainer or basketball coach. His peers would lean toward his coaching. His 355-308 career record might not prove it, but when he had good players he had very good teams, and when he had very good players he had great teams. And when he had a great player in Wally Szczerbiak, in 1998-99, Miami advanced to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 with victories over Washington and Utah.

At Miami, Coles’ teams appeared in the Mid-American Conference title game his first five seasons, and the RedHawks won the tournament in 1997 and 2007. He twice was named the league’s coach of the year.

After playing at Miami from 1962-65, he began his coaching career as an assistant at Sycamore High in Cincinnati, then got his first college job as an assistant at Detroit in 1982. He became head coach at Central Michigan in 1985 and took that program to the NCAA Tournament in 1987, with Dan Majerle as star.

Coles had the look and cadence of a jazz musician, and his postgame press conferences could be just as improvisational and unforgettable as the best John Coltrane riff.

He could turn his answer to the most routine question into performance art. You’d never see it coming in advance, except if you remembered that every encounter with Coles was likely to be memorable.

Coles had serious heart issues for years. He suffered a serious heart attack during a MAC Tournament game at Western Michigan in March 1998, but he recovered to continue his career for well more than a decade afterward. He’d already had one bypass operation before that, according to Sendek.

“His discipline almost was unnerving,” Sendek said. “He was so careful about his diet. If you had a potato chip, you felt terrible because he was so disciplined.

“As a basketball coach, he was really, really good. It seemed to me, especially on the defensive end. A lot of what I learned when he was working with us at Miami, we still emphasize today. He was a coach’s coach. He loved the game and poured so much of his life into the game.”